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chinese scholars and the haitian revolution, black reason and frantz fanon

1. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
Annalee Ring Orcid-ID

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This paper critically examines the pervasive colonial myth that associates whiteness with cleanliness and blackness with dirtiness, a myth often perpetuated through media, especially soap advertisements. Through an analysis of Frantz Fanon’s contributions to psychoanalysis and phenomenology, the paper elucidates how racial constructs are sociogenically constructed and internalized, shaping the collective unconscious. Focusing on Fanon’s phenomenological exploration of the white gaze, the paper highlights its role in overdetermining the black man, reducing them to an object embodying racial myths. The paper demonstrates the enduring influence these entrenched myths have on racialized habits of perception and advocates for their disruption. The ongoing presence of colonial mythologies in modern soap advertising demonstrates the need for a concerted effort to dismantle these sedimented habits. The conclusion focuses specifically on challenging the myth of whiwhiteness as cleanliness as it continues to operate.

book reviews

2. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
Frederick Mills

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3. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

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4. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
August Shipman

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5. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
Justin Wooley

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6. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
Thomas Jay Lynn Orcid-ID

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7. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
Rachel McNealis

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8. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2
Paget Henry

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9. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1/2

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10. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Paget Henry

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tributes to george lamming and charles mills

11. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Linden F. Lewis Orcid-ID

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12. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Paget Henry

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13. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
George Yancy

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14. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Teófilo Reis

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sylvia wynter, post-structuralism and ceremonies of solidarity

15. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Brendan John Brown

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This essay seeks to unsettle the overrepresented, Eurocentric grounds of a pivotal debate in the history of Western philosophy. The debate between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on the topic of madness has had central significance for twentieth-century continental thought due to its lasting impact on the development, reception, and stakes of the respective thinker’s methodologies. While heavily written on and analyzed from the perspective of Western academic philosophy, little attention has been paid to the racialized, ‘Third World’ origins and structures of the debate and its content. I contend that the work of Sylvia Wynter addresses, critiques, and ameliorates these structures in heretofore previously unacknowledged ways. Specifically, Wynter’s work in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, her diptych on the Ceremony (Must Be) Found, and her critical engagements with the submerged “abducting logic” of Western thought marks an incisive critique of both Foucault and Derrida’s interpretation of reason and madness in Western philosophy. As I argue, Wynter is committed to deconstructing the binary of madness/reason so as to unsettle the overrepresentation of Western logos. She does so through the liminal figure of the “black cogito” which disrupts and shakes the foundations of the debate, nor can either conflicting interpretation neatly assimilate this figure. That is, by deconstructing the debate on the history of madness Wynter demonstrates the paucity of their arguments about, on the one hand, the history of reason and the exclusion of madness, and, on the other, the metaphysical ambiguity of the Cartesian cogito. This essay aims to set out on an alternative history of the deconstruction of Western metaphysics initiated from the demonic grounds of being.
16. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Elisabeth Paquette Orcid-ID

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The focus of this essay is Sylvia Wynter’s conception of ceremony. I argue that ceremonies provide the conditions for a new conception of what it means to be human, that is no longer hierarchical. As such, both ceremonies and this new human are necessary for processes of liberation. In order to be liberatory, however, ceremonies must be place-based and yet fluid and mobile, are steeped in history and are thrust into the future, depend upon community, and impact daily experiences. I argue that employing the best aspects of ceremony can provide the tools for developing coalitional movements, which are often already employed by Black and Indigenous communities. I call this process ceremonies of liberation.

feminism, eldercare, trafficking and modernity in the u.s. and china

17. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Samantha Brady

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Classic feminist social theory highlights the exploitation of women’s labor in capitalist societies traditionally through an examination of how housework and childcare is perceived and organized, excluding an explicit analysis of older adult care work. In light of the surge in the demand for older adult caregiving over the last several decades, this paper uses older adult care work as a new lens to understand how gender, and its intersections with other critical identities such as race, ethnicity, and nativity, are a basis for continued exploitation and marginalization in modern capitalist systems. Building on Marxist feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s work on social value and domination, I argue that women’s care labor, both paid and unpaid, is an instrument of capital accumulation that differentially exploits women based on key intersectional identities. An examination of the system of older adult care work in the United States allows us to see the multilayered and complex system of exploitation that creates and institutionalizes existing social hierarchies as capitalism seeks to expand. The paper ends with a discussion of two potential family care paths America could conceivably pursue in the coming years; one toward increased commodification of care work in line with neoliberal capitalism, and the other toward more comprehensive social welfare policies that alleviate women’s reproductive labor burden and begin to break down gendered and racialized hierarchies.
18. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Xiangning Xu

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Instigated by the incident of the chained woman in Feng County, Jiang Su Province, this paper offers a phenomenological argument on the workhorses legitimizing and sustaining women trafficking in China. Specifically, I leverage the Imperial Man and the Paradigm of War by Nelson Maldonado-Torres and construct a pair of paralleled concepts: the Patriarchal Man and the Paradigm of Family. In analyzing the social media coverage of the chained woman and government responses, I argue that the Patriarchal Man and the Paradigm of Family create and perpetuate a common understanding that enables and normalizes women trafficking within a broader circuit. This circuit includes both state actors such as government officials and local actors who are not directly involved in trafficking, in addition to the traffickers, buyers and sellers. To combat women trafficking, we need law reforms as well as a phenomenological reduction of the Patriarchal man. I suggest three potential ways for the phenomenological reduction.

james, glissant, beauvoir, habermas and the socialist alternative

19. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Talia Isaacson

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This paper examines C.L.R James’s interpretation of Athenian democracy in “Every Cook Can Govern” (1956). It seeks to explain why Athenian democracy remained indispensable to James’s political thought. I argue that James reinterprets Athens as a proto-workers’ state, and explore the resulting contradictions and complexities. Within “Every Cook Can Govern” James presents a radical interpretation of Athenian Democracy at three points: (1) James claims that slavery in Athens was humane and economically insignificant, (2) he supports the theory of the “Athenian Miracle” found in Pericles’s Funeral Oration, and (3) he chooses to end his essay with a misleading interpretation of the anti-tyranny oath of Demophantos. James idealizes Athenian political realities, and ultimately invents his own version of Athens. But his idealization arose from principled skepticism regarding mainstream views of Athenian democracy and his political commitment to defending the capabilities of the ordinary person.
20. The CLR James Journal: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1/2
Ruthanne Crapo Kim Orcid-ID

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In this article, I briefly sketch the “right to opacity” that Édouard Glissant details in Poetics of Relation and situate it as an ethical imperative with Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, contrasting the distinctive contributions of opacity and ambiguity toward ethical-political living. I apply the principles of opacity and ambiguity toward one of Beauvoir’s most political and only co-written works, Pour Djamila Boupacha. I argue that the polyvalent use of the Islamic veil during the Algerian War for Independence reveals the ethical application of opacity and ambiguity. Additionally, the veil clarifies the political stakes of gendered assumptions and racial hierarchy across geographies, positing a false body neutrality that obfuscates the violent global War on Terror.